CNET reporter Jay Greene, an avid skier, hit the slopes to try three pricey goggles with heads-up displays showing his speed and distance. Glitches in both the hardware and software led him to a much cheaper, more reliable alternative.

Chris Lee’s first thought after seeing the Millennium Falcon was a bit different from Luke Skywalker’s.

“When they walk down the stairs into the docking bay and Luke looks up and goes, ‘What a piece of junk!’ — as soon as he said that, I had the opposite reaction,” Lee said. “I was like, ‘It’s not a piece of junk. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve got to have me one of these!’ ”

Lee’s dream, hatched when he was a 12-year-old watching the first “Star Wars” movie at the old Cinema North theater near RiverGate Mall in 1977, wasn’t simply a boyhood fantasy. It just might come true one day.

OTTAWA — It was an inside job of sorts. Thieves with access to a warehouse and a careful plan loaded up trucks and, over time, made off with $18 million of a valuable commodity.

The question is what was more unusual: that the commodity in question was maple syrup, or that it came from something called the global strategic maple syrup reserve, run by what amounts to a Canadian cartel.

Scientists at the University of Illinois in Chicago discover that men solve brain teasers better after a couple of beers. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was known to give interviews while drinking beer. Coincidence?

hael Hudson’s presentation for the session “The Challenge of DeLeveraging and Overhangs of Debt II: The Politics and Economics of Restructuring” at the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s (INET) Paradigm Lost Conference in Berlin. April 13, 2012.